Top 4 Ways To Optimize Your Email Marketing Campaigns Email is still one of the most essential communication tools between universities and prospective students, yet it’s often not used to its full potential. With a few simple tips, universities can ensure that the maximum number of people possible read their communications, which in turn will help convert prospective applicants into students. Here are our top four tips for creating an email marketing strategy which really works:
1. A killer subject line Around 33% of email recipients use the subject line to decide whether or not to open an email, making it vital that they’re as well-crafted as possible. Each day, the vast majority of people are inundated with more and more emails from a huge number of companies they’ve half-heartedly signed up to, and prospective students are certainly no different. If you want them to wade through their inbox and open your email, you have to make it enticing. Keep it short and sweet. An overly long subject line is a mistake many marketers make, and when you consider that almost half of all emails are opened on a mobile device, it’s clear how necessary it is to keep them short and sweet. To make sure email recipients can read the entire thing, subject lines should be kept to around 50 characters. Use numbers to draw the eye. Numbers are also a great way of getting people to open emails. Our eyes are drawn to digits; they provide something which stands out from the rest of the text. As this article in The New Yorker puts it:
“Whenever we’re scanning the environment for nothing in particular, our visual system is arrested by the things that don’t fit – features that suddenly change or somehow stand out from the background. A headline that is graphically salient in some way has a greater chance of capturing our eye, and in an environment where dozens of headlines and stories vie for attention, numerals break up the visual field.“ Lists are also simple to understand, bitesize and a lot less daunting than a large ream of text – for busy people this can be very appealing.